Tiffani shared research on how best of breed firms are dividing their limited budgets into 3 piles during these difficult economic times.

 

60-66% of budget is allocated to running current infrastructure. Computers, Servers, Support, Internet connectivity, firewall / threat management, dial tone, help desk, backups - what you need to keep your business running day to day.

 

14-18% is allocated to growth of existing infrastructure, if needed.

 

The most important - 17-26% is spent on transformative  technologies - making the business run better in new ways. These include unified communications or VOIP, home-shoring,  Software as a Service (hosted applications like email, archiving, and CRM) virtual meeting and collaboration tools, and video conferencing.

 

"If you are spending 80% or more on run, talk to experts who can help you use your budget more effectively - to help you free up dollars for transformative change", advises Bova. "Otherwise, you are not staying competitive."

 

Synertel recently did a security audit of a firm in San Francisco that had purchased up-to-date threat protection ... but the installers goofed and forgot to enable protection. Fortunately, this was easily remedied.

 

When times are tough, businesses look to control operating costs and reduce risk. Synertel Managed Workplace is a powerful tool for proactively detecting and avoiding network, server, printer, and workstation problems - BEFORE they impact productivity.  SMW provides monitoring, alerting, proactive network tuning, plus remote and onsite services to detect and solve problems before they become catastrophes.

 

Monitoring can detect hundreds of things - and make as big or little a deal about them as you want.  Examples include

 

- low disk space,

- printers about to run out of toner

- security patches that didn't apply

- viruses found and quarantined

- LAN traffic jams,

- if your website is ever down

-   if an employee installs personal software on a company PC.

 

 

SMW can serve as a radar screen for your existing IT staff - with all alerts and tickets flowing to your staff, or we can take shared or full responsibility for monitoring, managing, and intervening.  Every minute of IT downtime costs your organization in lost productivity -- even before the cost of solving the problem. Let us help trim those costs.

 

If you think network management is a luxury in tough times -- you may be thinking tactically, not strategically! A small wise investment in proactive monitoring avoids larger (and more variable) costs of being reactive.

 

SMW can even monitor your telephone system and voicemail!  For more details, call 415 746 1811 or email managedworkplace@synertel.com.

 

 For a complimentary assessment of your organization's IT and Telecom spending and resources, call Ben Stiegler at 415 746 1811 or email ben@synertel.com